Fifty things about me

Ilyka Damen did this ages ago, and I loved reading those posts of hers. So I’m going to try it myself and see if I think it’s TMI and stop, or if I’m going to make it all the way up to 50.

1. I love elephant jokes. All of them, no matter how old, how stupid, or how many times I have heard them. I laugh at them, over and over again. A friend of mine used to have a book that he’d use to refresh his repertoire every so often, and tell me elephant jokes whenever I asked. Even when he lived upstairs from me in the same apartment house, I never got tired of hearing them. Seriously. I love elephant jokes.

2. I love watching infomercials, especially the ones on food preparation devices. It doesn’t matter if I don’t like the food they’re preparing with the tool, or that I will probably never buy a cooking tool via an infomercial. I like watching them. I would be a member of an infomercial cooking audience in a heartbeat. Hell, I say, “Set it, and forget it!” from time to time, for no apparent reason. (I hope this doesn’t make you think any less of me.)

I’ve purchased one exercise machine via an informercial, and bought two used items because of the Tony Little Gazelle Glider infomercials. But I bought my Super Slicer at the Englishtown flea market for like, ten bucks, and I’m looking for that hair dryer stand in the stores, because geez, that’s a useful item. Come to think of it, the Super Slicer commercial was my first and favorite: It featured a chef with a pencil-thin mustache, a phony (and awful) French accent, and lots and lots of sliced vegetables. A friend and I discovered a heretofore-unknown fondness for infomercials around the time that commercial went on the air. “Okay, this is embarrassing, but I was up late last night, and I saw the funniest infomercial.” “You saw it too? I thought it was hilarious!”

Oh, stop. Like you’ve never watched one yourselves?

I still have my original Super Slicer, but I rarely use it – I have since aquired a professional chef’s mandoline slicer.

3. I cannot stand hair on the soap. Not one strand. I will stand there in the shower and get out the tiniest fragment of hair that has lodged itself in my bar of soap. I hate it. I am obsessive about it.

4. On that same subject, I can’t stand strongly-scented soaps and shampoos. I use unscented soaps if at all possible (and would someone please explain to me how “unscented” means “slightly-perfumed” Dove soap?), and all shampoos and deodorants must be of reasonably low perfume. It’s not because I’m allergic. It’s because I smell good. No, really. I have extremely strong senses of taste and smell, and always have had, even when I was a carton-a-week smoker. If you want to blind me, just load yourself down with perfume or cologne and walk nearby. The tears will spring to my eyes.

5. I hate manipulative, emotional scenes that deliberately try to make you cry, like Hallmark commercials and badly-written TV shows. I hate them because they manipulate my emotions even though I know that’s exactly what they’re trying to do. Dammit.

6. I love “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” It is one of the greatest films ever made. My brothers and I have been watching it since we were kids, and watch it today and still laugh at it. We also quote it to each other frequently. One of my happiest moments as an aunt was hearing my nephew say, “You’re buggin’ me, man, you’re buggin’ me!” to his father.

7. I do not like being told what to do. At all. If you speak to me in the imperative, the world will end before I will do what you want. On the other hand, if you simply ask me the same thing, and it is a reasonable request, no problem. But try to tell me what to do or think, and I will dig in my heels forever. I especially don’t like being told that I “should” like something. If I don’t like it, I don’t like it. End of story. Deal with it.

8. I am stubborn. I have always been stubborn. When I was a child, my brothers and I would wrestle with my father. Eventually, he’d get each of us in a hold and say he wouldn’t let us go until we said “Uncle.” I never said it. Not. Ever. I do not like to give up. (I’m also smart enough to have figured out he’d have to let me go eventually.)

9. Three is not a crowd in my family. There is an invisible bond between my brothers and me that becomes almost palpable when the three of us are together. It apparently strikes fear into the hearts of the insecure. We call it “The Cone of Yourish,” in homage to Maxwell Smart’s Cone of Silence. Apparently, we speak in arcane references that only we understand, know what the others are thinking, and (duh) have a common reference frame. Hello, uh, we did grow up together. I know there are siblings who are not the least bit close, but, well, we are. My sister-in-law got used to it a long time ago, although she will throw us a few exasperated looks when we delve a little too deeply back towards childhood. Probably because we have a tendency to devolve a bit, and act, well, childish. I expect my nephew will be rolling his eyes at our behavior sooner or later. He’s a teenager now.

10. I hate playing head games. I hate all kinds of behavioral bullshit. If you have something to tell me, tell me. If I have something to tell you, I will generally tell you, even if it’s going to be something you don’t like to hear. As a result of this tendency, I have lost friends who did not like to hear certain things about themselves, mostly to do with their overexposure to alchohol. I can’t stand drunks, but that’s a subject for another day.

Part two. Part three. Part four. Part five. Part six.